Well, but has Meyer fixed the “error”? It has been called to his attention. So has the “error” about his mis-cite of Erwin. So have many other “errors.” But the DI just doubles down and moves on. Why? Because the books are not intended to convince a literate audience.
When that is seen, surely it does mean that one cannot trust the work. It means one cannot trust the author. Game over, really.
If I were really interested in promoting ID, the first thing I would do is cast these books into a heap and burn them. The project has gone nowhere and generated nothing; if there is to be a credible ID, no foundation has been built. One would simply need to start over.
I’ve made no comment specifically on how Meyer used Erwin. I’ve neither condemned nor defended his usage. I haven’t studied the question, and I don’t make comments on what I haven’t studied. But if I studied the Erwin passage and his use of it, and came to the conclusion that Meyer was misrepresenting Erwin’s idea, I would first try to find the most charitable explanation (Christians tend to do that), and only consider dishonesty after I had exhausted the charitable explanations. I like to give authors the benefit of the doubt.
So I don’t “know” that Meyer was being dishonest because I haven’t studied the case, which is why I resisted your imputation regarding what I “know.”
If he used the wrong chemical name, it should be fixed in the next printing. Maybe there hasn’t been a new printing since the error was pointed out. But it should be fixed. The publisher should fix it even if Meyer doesn’t. But I still want to know why the naming error invalidates the entire argument of Meyer’s book. No one has shown me that it does.
The naming error doesn’t invalidate Meyer’s argument in the book. It’s all the data cherry-picking, misrepresentations, and outright lies in Darwin’s Doubt which invalidate Meyer’s argument.
But, as you have been shown, I made no assertion that you know Meyer was dishonest. I simply pointed out that Meyer’s statement was not an opinion about the paper or just another way of looking at the paper. You cannot, in fact, read the paper and his statement and not know that. It’s just objectively so.
You see, this reflexive defense of the very worst behavior on the part of ID advocates is ridiculous. They are extremely shoddy in their books. Not EVERY misstatement of theirs can be shown to be dishonest, but surely there is no other plausible interpretation in this case, among others. And the desire to give them the benefit of some sort of courteous presumption becomes absurd. Even as a child I knew that while it was always POSSIBLE that the man in the van who said he could drive me to a party where there was lots of free candy was telling the truth, the character of the claim did not speak well for the odds. How many vans must one get into before being allowed to draw an inference?
That’s what I have done. And it doesn’t get you where you want to go. There is no way to square this with Meyer being honest – not after the false claim has been called to his attention and he has done nothing about it. Not when the whole book is structured to avoid entire classes of evidence that would undo his whole thesis.
Again: it is good to remember Randi’s observations about scientists and their naivety in dealing with intentional deception. If you keep insisting that the pigeon-drop artist just may be telling the truth this time, you’re going to end up as the owner of a lot of useless paper – which is actually a pretty good description of a collector of ID literature. If you do not insist on holding ID authors to basic standards of decent behavior, who will? They certainly will not.
Has Meyer corrected his false claim that peptide transferase is a protein?
Since the fact that it is a ribozyme is the strongest evidence supporting the RNA World hypothesis, it has to be the central point of any honest argument for or against that hypothesis. That would require a lot of other revisions to achieve any sort of consilience.
There’s just no evidence to suggest that it was an error.
Denton blundered by considering evolution as a ladder rather than a tree when analysing molecular distances. I think that blunder raises enough doubts about his competence that I won’t read his books. For educational purposes, anyway.
And on over half a dozen articles I cited on the use of “ID/intelligent design creationism”, confidently informing me that only one of them used the term, when in fact they all did (he just hadn’t read any of them).
Christians (at least of a certain stripe) tend to do THAT, too.
I am glad to say that in my personal life I know very few of that stripe. But adherence to ID is usually just one symptom of a whole complex of poor mental habits.
And I’m still waiting for links to the inside of each article, so that I can read the statements in context. That request was several days ago. Nothing has been provided. So I consider the topic dead until I have the texts to examine.
It wasn’t a mere vocabulary error. It was hiding the strongest evidence for the hypothesis he was trying to tear down from his readers.
And it wasn’t a single error, he literally misrepresented the hypothesis to complement it:
p.298: “According to this [RNA-first] model, these RNA enzymes eventually were replaced by the more efficient proteins that perform enzymatic functions in modern cells.”
That’s not the hypothesis, Eddie. The hypothesis predicts ribozyme relics in some essential processes–like the ribosome. Evolution is limited in ways that ID is not, you see.
In addition, if it was a mere vocabulary error, it would have come up somewhere else in a chapter devoted to the RNA World hypothesis.
No. I have no library access, as I said before. If someone wants me to believe that something is in a source, I need to be shown the text, and enough of it to make sure there is adequate context.
I already ask friends to get me a large number of articles, but I don’t want to impose on their time and exhaust their good will. Where the article is something I need for my work, I don’t mind asking, but I’m not going to put friends to work every time Burke or you dumps a list of articles on my lap and demands that I read them.
Stop making excuses for Burke. He can send me links to the passages, or upload sufficiently long sections – he has done the latter here many times before. (Often battering people with long texts they didn’t request.) If he’s too lazy to do the work to get the texts to me, he can hardly complain about my failure to look at them.
Your adolescent behavior in regularly jumping in and siding with anyone who attacks me, on any topic, has long been observed. A moderator on BioLogos noted to me in private communication your regular giving of “Likes” to any poster who criticized my views, no matter what the topic was, and thought it petty. And you were not the only one there who exhibited this behavior; another poster currently here routinely did the same thing when on BioLogos.